Searching the Past to Understand the Future

Bullying

02/05/2013

So back when I wrote my Being Me posts and then wandered off into the weeds with stuff that annoyed me about the internet I thought I’d wrap it all up with a post about bullying as an act of enforcing conformity. My general, overarching point was that anyone can become a bully. All it takes is attempting to force other people to conform to a specific notion of what it means to be a [insert group here]. The bullied sometimes become the bullies when they get power. It’s a tic of human nature, basically.

The solution to bullying, I’ve come to believe, is to say, “I am [insert label here] and you don’t get to define that for me.” Alternately, in the case of some bullies – such as MRAs, who compelled me to write a recent post – the solution is to say, “I don’t give a shit what you think, since your labels are stupid and don’t apply to me. Or reality.” It helps when people outside that specific situation then come alongside and help people see the bigger picture. This idea was basically the genesis of Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, to name a famous example.

The last couple days an interesting thing has been happening over at Scalzi’s place that illustrates my point way better than the post I never wrote would have. A fellow Scalzi refers to as the Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit (RSHD for short, because Scalzi has no urge to use his real name or link to him) has been talking all kinds of shit about Scalzi for the last few months using fairly standard MRA bullshit. This resulted in a lot of trolls heading over to Whatever and annoying the hell out of Scalzi. Scalzi doesn’t seem to like being annoyed by trolls that much. So he did something about it.

Specifically, he pledged to donate money to organizations pushing for equality every time the RSHD mentioned him, capped out at a grand. That’s where the internet took over, specifically the bit where Scalzi is one of the true mensches of the internet and has one hell of a following. Other people started pledging, too. By the end of the day the pledges were over $20,000. By now, three days later, the pledges are at over $50,000.

That’s pretty much amazing. It’s a whole lot of people standing up and saying, “We don’t want your bullying. But we’re going to make something good come out of it and make you look like an ass in the process.” It won’t stop the RSHD, since he seems to get off on shit like this, but this sort of thing isn’t directed at the RSHD. It’s directed at observers to show that there are those who are willing to stand up to the bullies. It’s also intended to show that the bullies themselves are absurd and can be effectively ignored.

It seems to be working, too. Scalzi got a write-up in the freaking Guardian. And the Guardian article called the RSHD a “Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit.” It also didn’t use the RSHD’s real name nor did it link to his blog(s). It’s brilliant, really.

Scalzi also commissioned some art. See, MRAs use the (largely discredited) notion of Alpha and Beta males to make sure everyone knows they’re the alphas and everyone who isn’t exactly like them is a beta or a gamma or whatever and, therefore, inferior. There are also animal themes in there for some reason. Scalzi’s solution was to say, “Hey, in your taxonomy I’m a Gamma Rabbit. That sounds like an awesome thing to be, since I’m happy.”

That’s the only way to approach people who try to call you inferior but whose only power is with words. Take away the power of those words and you stymie the bullying.

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I figured out who the RSHD was almost immediately. Spend any time on the internet paying attention to MRAs and one name pops up a lot: Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale. He’s harassed PZed and Ed Brayton over the years, who are also a couple of guys who don’t let bullies use them as chew toys. They have a different, significantly less whimsical style, though.

I checked over at Pharyngula to see if PZed had anything to say, mostly out of curiosity. What he had was a link to a Jim Hines post about Beale running for President of the SFWA, an organization for speculative fiction authors which has been headed by one John Scalzi for the last couple of years. I find that notion fascinating.

If you go back to my previous MRA post about an idiot who went after Fred it occurs to me that the entire reason anyone becomes a bully, especially an internet bully, is because they’re deeply unhappy. So they define themselves according to some scale where they can show the world (themselves, mostly) how amazing they are). Seeing someone who doesn’t use their scale but who is also obviously content with the world must, then, be absolutely awful.

That’s basically why Scalzi keeps saying that Vox has a mancrush on him. I’m not saying that Vox Day is a deeply self-loathing closet case (mostly because I have endeavored to know as little about him as possible). I’m saying that Vox Day is a great example of a deeply self-loathing bully who keeps trying to find meaning by emulating the path and then destroying the happiness of others. That must be an awful way to live.

01/17/2013

I suppose it’s possible that most MRAs on the internet are all just extremely skilled and subtle satirists attempting to offer a display of exactly what it looks like when an overly testosteroned bully crawls so far up his own ass that he can no longer breathe through all the shit. Somehow, though, I doubt that’s the case. I doubt that’s the case, specifically, because every time I run into an MRA he’s so very serious and mean-spirited that I can’t believe he has enough human empathy to actually engage in satire. So either every MRA is dead serious, every MRA is a pitch perfect satirist, or all MRAs are one or the other. I’m forced to assume that it’s the first option, mostly because satirizing that sort of bullshit would be exhausting.

I bring this up because of Fred Clark over at Slacktivist. See, a couple of years ago he got married to a woman who already had kids from a previous marriage. From time to time he writes about his adopted daughters and gives off the impression that 1.) he’s adjusted to fatherhood quite well, thankyouverymuch and that 2.) he’s rather proud of his adopted daughters and pretty much treats them as if they were his own. He is, in short, a mensch in this just as much as he is in pretty much everything else he does.

I think that Fred’s example here is important. A couple of months ago I tossed in a bit about my realization that at 31 I was seriously limiting my dating options with my blanket ban on single mothers. This is a phenomenon that we as a society will have to deal with more and more, as there are a lot of people out there who have kids and are also not in committed, long-term relationships with their co-parent.

This isn’t a problem from a moral standpoint. This is, however, a problem from a logistical and emotional standpoint. Getting into a relationship is, by itself, fraught with complications. Getting into a relationship with someone who has kids through another person is far, far more complicated.

I actually tossed a question about the whole thing into a post a couple months ago. It was a thought experiment because I’ve run up against the problem a couple of times and I’d thought about it but hadn’t actually put myself into a position to deal with it. So I solicited advice. I got a comment from Mike Timonin that was definite food for thought:

The thing you need to keep in mind in regard to kids in a family is that families are exponential, not additive. So, if you meet someone and form a relationship (any relationship, but let's assume romantic for the moment), that 2 - your relationship with hir and hir relationship with you. Add a kid (or any other person - poly relationships are complicated in the same way) and you're not just adding one new relationship, but 3 - the kid's relationship with their parent, the kid's relationship with you, and the kid's relationship with your relationship with hir parent. So, it's complicated. You need to consider how you feel about the mom, and about the kid, and about how your relationship with the mom will affect the parent-child relationship and so on.

It was really thoughtful and I meant to respond to it at the time, but, um, I didn’t. Mostly because I’m easily distracted by – hey! Look! A squirrel!

I actually think that Mike understated the problem. If you get into a relationship with someone who has a kid you have to manage your relationship with that person. You have to manage your relationship with that kid. You have to be aware of how they relate to each other. You also have to be aware of the fact that you now have a relationship with the biological parent with whom you are not in a relationship. You also now have two sets of biological grandparents and you have to deal with the fact that you’ve now made your own family into a collection of in-laws and grandparents, aunts, and/or uncles. It’s all crazy go nuts, basically.

You also don’t get an easy mode. I’ve spent most of the last decade in easy mode and, I’ve got to tell you, it’s been pretty easy. If I want to sit around and drink beer and watch TV and not give a shit about anything I can. If I want to go on a couple dates with someone somewhere I can. Since I’ve mostly been dealing with women who are also childless I’ve been able to make and break last-minute plans without too much difficulty.

Bring someone with a kid into that and it’s totally different. At least, I’d assume it’s different. I mean, I have a dog. I can’t go anywhere without putting some amount of thought into the question of, “What will I do with Daisy?” If I’m going to the store I just let her run around and play with her toys. If I’m going to be gone for a few hours I have to crate her. If I’m going to be gone longer I have to make arrangements to take her somewhere. You can’t leave a child alone for any length of time (or, at least, you can’t do it without risking a visit from your friendly neighborhood DCFS case worker). So something as simple as a coffee date ends up being a major investment (at least, I assume).

If I were to date someone with a kid I’d have to be aware of that and sensitive to it. If it were to get more serious than a couple dates and then an, “I don’t think we’re really compatible,” I’d then have to be willing and able to incorporate this woman and also her offspring and also all of the baggage that comes with this woman and her offspring into my life. That might be a major sacrifice on my part, too. Am I dealing with someone who has an actively involved father who pays alimony or am I suddenly taking on the burden of paying for all the kid’s needs when I’m accustomed to blowing my extra money on craft beer and chicken schwarma at Naf Naf? Am I going to have to start putting my pita money towards a college fund?

Am I, in short, prepared to be both a boyfriend/husband and father when last week I wasn’t sure if I was even ready to be a boyfriend?

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I bring all of this stuff up because I saw one of the most absolutely dickish things ever at Fred’s place last week. He’s been doing this ongoing series called “Chick-fil-A Biblical Family of the Day” in which he copies passages of the Bible about families that look nothing like the Cleavers from Leave it to Beaver. The whole thing is a satire on the concept of “Biblical families” pushed by Evangelical Christians as an attempt to fight against things they don’t like by saying, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”

Are we really supposed to take family advice from an unemployed mangina raising a fitter man's seed? I bet you even think your wife's not cheating on you.

Everything about that comment set off every single one of the various, “Oh, holy hell, what kind of an asshole are you?” alarms in my head. Several commenters called him out for it, but a couple asked if he was responding to Fred’s post or Fred himself. At that point Eric the Red proved that, yes, he’s a complete and total shitheel:

Of course I was talking about Fred. Truly did Heartiste speak correctly of his kind (and the other snivelling manboobs here) when he said:

Your typical outrage feminist and limp-wristed manboob flirts dangerously close to the monster threshold. Humans recoil from manjawed, mustachioed, beady-eyed, actively aggressive women and chipmunk-cheeked, bitch tittied, curvaceously plush, passive-aggressive men as if they were the human equivalent of dog shit. The farther your feminist or manboob deviates from the normal human template, in physical and psychological form, the more monstrous it becomes to the average person.

Now imagine you stomp through life as one of these howling feminists or putrid nancyboys, like Grendel disturbed by the sights and sounds of normalcy all around him. You sense, in your darkest secret thoughts, that most people are repulsed by you, want to have nothing to do with you, would be embarrassed to be seen with you. How do you think that would affect your mental state? First, you would seek out others like you. Monstrosity loves company. Then, you would lash out at anything normal, elevating the wicked and deviant while eroding confidence in the good and beautiful, twisting cherished moral standards that work adequately to sustain a normal population into bizarre, exaggerated facsimiles manufactured solely to do the bidding of your freak cohort.

So…first of all…all of the italicized word salad is something Eric the Red was quoting from somewhere else. I’m not going to include the link, since, well, fuck that misogynistic asshole, that’s why. But, seriously, this guy is a total and unrepentant shitheel. And the guy he quoted with much admiration has all of the writing ability of a brain-damaged orangutan who has been handed a smartphone with a particularly glitchy autocorrect.

That said, there’s a certain horrible beauty to the awkwardly strung together words above. It’s almost a form of beat poetry, really. I imagine John Lithgow would do amazing work with “Then, you would lash out at anything normal, elevating the wicked and deviant while eroding confidence in the good and beautiful, twisting cherished moral standards that work adequately to sustain a normal population into bizarre, exaggerated facsimiles manufactured solely to do the bidding of your freak cohort.” It’s not exactly a Newt Gingrich press release, but it’s still potentially pretty in its self-important incoherence.

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I think it’s important to talk about things like this. Divorce is a reality in our world. Extra-marital sex resulting in pregnancy is a reality in our world. Single parents are a reality in our world.

Those single parents, whether they had sex outside of marriage, got divorced, or had to bury their biological co-parent, meanwhile, shouldn’t be expected to suddenly stop looking to love and be loved. To expect that is folly. To mock someone who then decides to love a single parent and invite that person and that person’s kid(s) and all of the complications of biological parents and grandparents and all of that into their life a lesser being is the height of unabashed assholery. It’s also an admission on the part of the mocker that they don’t have anything close to the level of character of the person they’re mocking.

Of course using the word “mangina” in all seriousness is also the height of unabashed assholery. But that’s a story for another day.

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It’s one of those things that goes back to my discussions of bullying and my theory that people end up choosing between empathy and resentment and that choice guides how they react to others. The example offered by Eric the Red above is obviously one of someone who has chosen resentment. It’s weird, too, since he obviously reads Fred’s stuff enough to know that Fred is currently unemployed and the husband of a woman who has children from a previous relationship. That means that he’s been sitting there, seething in his resentment about Fred for a while. That’s pretty sad, really.

There’s another level where it fascinates me. When I ask whether I could date a woman who already has a kid the question basically boils down to this: am I a good enough person to deal with this? Could I drop my basic self-absorption and accept a whole constellation of complications into my life without switching from empathy and love to resentment and hatred?

It seems to me that mocking someone who has made that choice and calling him a lesser being for doing so is a pretty good way to advertise that you’re a pretty massive jackhole.

12/24/2012

I was hanging out with friends on a Tuesday, doing my usual Tuesday bar trivia thing.

A woman walked up looking for the whole trivia thing, so she stopped to ask the people at our table where the bar trivia stuff was going on. She looked pretty much like the sort woman you’d imagine catfighting on that dumb show about Hugh Heffner’s many ex-wives. Her voice had that upward lilt that made every sentence sound like a question and that made her sound like, well, a typical ditzy blonde who gets through life on looks.

My friends were not particularly nice to her.

Later on I went and talked to her. She seemed like a completely decent human being.

My friends thought that my intention had been to hit on her. I didn’t tell them my real motivation, since my real motivation was hard to explain. I felt bad that she’d been made fun of and wanted to make sure someone was nice to her.

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I said in the last post that I think that you choose early whether you respond positively or negatively to misery. In reality it’s far more complicated than that. I think there’s a matrix of choices and reactions and the thing you choose at a young age is how you’re going to look at those moments and what steps you’re going to take.

You might, for instance, be kind to family and puppies and kick bums in the street.

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Humans organize the world into groups. This is often spoken of as a negative, but I think it’s an inevitability. There are simply too many people in the world to be able to account for everyone. So we separate what we know from what we think we know from what we don’t know at all and assign labels and stereotypes to everything.

In broad strokes we identify our family, then our friends, then our tribe, then our not-tribe that’s harmless, and then our enemies. We then sort that by those who are helpful, those who are neutral, and those who are harmful.[1] Our reactions are then pretty much programmed in and we can run it all off of a macro.

What I think we choose young is how we react to seeing misery in the situation of those who are outside of our tribe and can either not do anything for us or might actively harm us. It’s easy to help your friend who is in trouble. It’s similarly easy to ignore that kid you don’t know who’s in trouble. It’s also quite easy to see that person you actively don’t like who’s in trouble and to do what you can to add to his or her difficulties.

Empathy is what allows us to say, “I would hate to be in their shoes, so I’ll try to help them.”

Empathy is also a good way to find yourself alone. If you depart from your tribe to help your enemy you might find yourself without a tribe and with the only potential assistance coming from someone who was more than happy to trip you and steal your lunch money yesterday. Choosing empathy, then, has a very real potential social cost.

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It doesn’t surprise me that the word “empathy” has gotten treated like a four-letter word by the Glenn Becks and Bill O’Reillys of the world over the last couple of years. The very act of empathy is one of sacrifice and intentionally powerlessness. It cannot be used by the rich and powerful to increase their wealth and power. It can only be used to break down power.

I realized at the end of this last election cycle that it doesn’t really matter what happens and the outcome of the election barely mattered. Right now in America the rich and powerful have won. Sure, there were a few victories here and there, most notably on the front of gay rights. But the big questions aren’t even being fought over anymore.

What was the big question that kept getting asked during the election? “Are you doing better than you were four years ago?” It wasn’t, “Are we doing better?” All I’m supposed to care about is whether I am doing better or worse.

The first complaints I ran across from the anti-Obama folks after Election Night were complaints about the stock market dropping a smidge and the possibility that taxes might go up. Someone on Facebook basically said, “Hey, go thank your liberal friends for when your taxes go up next year and ask them how they feel about it.” I kind of wished he would have asked me, since the way I feel about it is, “I’m not too happy, but I’m pretty sure it’s necessary.”

I would love it if my country cut its military drastically and started spending more money on infrastructure, on making sure the poor are taken care of, and on making sure that our indigent and mental care facilities are top-notch. I would love it if someone admitted that, yes, sometimes taxes have to go up on some to make things better for all. I’m perfectly willing to admit that if I’m one of the some I’ll take that hit because I’m also one of the all.

That’s what empathy gets you. That’s the choice that I made when I was young. I tried to see the people around me as humans, rather than labels. I didn’t always do it well, but I always tried.

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Again we get to Evangelical Christianity in this discussion of empathy.

Evangelical Christianity is good at empathy for those in the tribe and terrible at empathy for everyone else. Oh, also, it’s often terrible at empathy for those in the tribe. So…yeah.

Growing up Evangelical you’re taught to divide everyone into tribes. It’s basically “us” and “them” and “we” are the forces of good and light and “they” are trying to burn down the world. As such, they must be countered at every turn and stopped at all costs. Every action they take must be place into the matrix of how it is used to mock Jesus and destroy Jesus’s people.

That’s how you end up with the absolutely mind-boggling confluence of Christianity, power, and hatred. Evangelical Christians give money to the NRA and support building a pointlessly large military while cutting money for the old and the poor because they’ve been encouraged to think of guns and the military as “us” and the poor and old as “them.” It helps immensely that it’s the evil liberals who want to take money from the rich and the fine patriots at Lockheed Martin to give it to those free-living, money grubbing homeless people.

Those who are outside the bubble are constantly baffled by the lack of internal consistency in the broad Evangelical position. There is a consistency to it, but it’s not a logical consistency. It’s simply that if [designated enemy non-tribal group] is against [thing], then I’m for it and if [designated enemy non-tribal group] is for [thing], then I’m against it. It helps, in this situation, to not remember what you were for last week, because you might be against it next week.

Within the tribe, though, there are also those who do not deserve empathy. Well, more precisely, there are those who aren’t doing enough to deserve empathy. Empathy in Christianity is a conditional thing, after all. Someone who isn’t seen as sufficiently holy will be the recipient of tough love or, from time to time, an intervention.[2]

The lack of empathy is fairly simple to understand, really. Everyone in Evangelical Christianity is encouraged to think if god as their bestest buddy and the relationship they have with god to be the most special possible relationship in the world. Everything that happens, then, is talked about as god’s attempt to teach that exact individual a lesson. People, then, stop being people and instead become object lessons or little reminders from god.

I’m not saying that non-Christians or non-Evangelicals can’t fall in to the pattern of thinking they’re the center of the universe, of course. I’m just saying that it’s encouraged in such a way as to invite absolutely no reflection in Evangelical circles. It’s barely even something that happens on the level of conscious thought, really. I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out where all of the crappy, negative lessons came from and the best I can deduce is that we all taught each other. I am just as implicated in my behaviors and actions as anyone else.

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One of the end results of empathy is the realization that you lack control. You make yourself powerless in the face of all of the terrible majesty of humanity at its best or worst. You might help your enemy today and find yourself at the bottom of his boot tomorrow. You might also find that your friends now say that you get what you deserved by clutching that particular viper to your chest. That’s just the nature of things. Empathy is always a risk.

That is why no one ever chooses empathy at all times. I see empathy as a response that is in constant conflict with the opposite potential response. But that is something for another day.

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[1]And, y’know, those who might take their pants off if we say the right thing. I feel like that might be a separate category, but I don’t know where it fits.

[2]I’ve talked about it here before, but the absolute worst thing that ever happened to me during my time working in ministry was after I took steps to resolve a situation that would have been completely appropriate in, say, a corporate environment (this was when I was at Western after working full time and being in and out of junior college for more than half a decade) or even at the church where I’d done most of my ministry before that. I was instead treated to several of the other leaders of the ministry I was part of springing a surprise, “Yell at two of the leaders and tell them we’re correcting them in love,” fest on me.

It obviously worked, since I still remember the event, I still say that what I did was absolutely appropriate, and I haven’t talked to any of those fuckers in years. The problem, now that I’m far enough removed from it to really understand what happened, was that the other leaders did not have a fucking clue what they were doing. They were running around playing at ministry and even though I wasn’t getting paid I was the closest to a professional they had. So when I saw a problem that needed to be fixed I went to the person that was most capable of fixing it and that, somehow, resulted in me being treated like an enemy.

12/21/2012

When I was in grade school I figured out that one of the other kids had things way worse than I did. He had genuine mental deficiencies and zero social savvy to speak of. For a brief period in either fourth or fifth grade I decided that somebody needed to be his friend and that somebody might as well be me.

It didn’t last long, as being his friend was genuinely thankless[1] and I was all of, what, ten years old?

At some later point I remember trying to figure out why all the kids picked on me. My teacher reminded me of the time that I’d tried to be a friend to the other kid and informed me that I had gotten respect for doing that. That was news to me. The lesson I learned was that I got picked on because I wasn’t good enough at being selfless and giving.

I think there was a secondary lesson, too: people like you more if you do the things they don’t want to deal with. Well, they might not like you more, but they’ll “respect” you more. Joy.

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This, inevitably, is where the church fits into the narrative. This is also why I’ve always had a hard time trying to figure out how the church fits into the narrative. There are really two notions of the church in my mind: the place I went for shelter and the place that made everything so, so much worse.

On the one hand, I started hanging out at church a lot and doing all of the youth group stuff because no one picked on me there. Well, at least, not as many people picked on me.[2] It was nice.

I also figured out that there’s a sort of automatic route to being respected in the church. All you have to do is show up, know things about the Bible, and know how to articulate the things you know. I was very good at doing all three of those things.

The drawback in church is far more insidious than a kid calling you names, though. I had defenses for you basic, run of the mill high school jackass. I had no defenses for the Cosmic Jackass.

The standard message of Evangelical Christianity is “you’re not good enough.” I had a hard time with that, since I was already pretty damned sure that I was a worthless bag of suck without the infallible word of god informing me that, yes, yes I was.[3]

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There are three basic human responses to witnessing misery: you can try to take steps to help, you can ignore it, or you can actively do things to make it worse. Choosing to do nothing and choosing to cause active harm really aren’t that different, as benign neglect is still a form of neglect. The thing about being the person who chooses to try to stop things is that you will often fail. Misery is too big, too strong, to hard to understand.

Misery also doesn’t scale. The personal misery is worse than the systemic misery. It’s possible to look at homelessness and say, “We can fix this by doing A, B, and C.” It’s not possible to look at a little kid who gets picked on and doesn’t know what to do and say, “We can fix this.” It’s a tiring, thankless, never-ending task.

I know this because I’m 31 years old and I still don’t know how to cope with things that happened half a lifetime ago. I also know that I’ve showed my ass on any number of occasions when people were just trying to help or didn’t even know they’d hit a raw nerve because they didn’t know me then and I’m not a big fan about talking about it.

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I think you choose your camp young. You’re either someone who tries to understand and fix misery or someone who doesn’t. This isn’t to say that you’re always in one camp or another. It’s also pretty obvious to me that everyone is going to not notice misery or try not to think about it from time to time.

I chose my camp in grade school, I suppose. I saw a kid who needed a friend and I tried to be his friend. I didn’t get anything out of it and failed at the whole enterprise.

Then when I failed I was told by a teacher that maybe if I hadn’t failed all the other kids wouldn’t have picked on me so much. I honestly think that she was well-meaning. I think she was trying to find helpful suggestions to fix the situation.

There is only one solution to that problem, though: the bullies need to be stopped from being bullies.

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This is where Christianity becomes monstrous. I found a measure of solace in church. Even that wasn’t complete, though, because I kept getting the message reinforced that I totally suck. All of the reasons that I sucked, though, were things that could theoretically be fixed.

It gradually dawned on me that the church was treating other people far, far worse than it treated me and that the entire institution permitted and even encouraged such mistreatment. That wasn’t the reason I left. It’s certainly a huge part of the reason I wouldn’t ever go back.[4]

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There are truly horrible people in the world. On some level I have to give the kids who picked on me a pass, since what the fuck does anybody know when they’re young?

If any of those people grew up to become the sort of person who argues against anti-bullying measures, though, they’d better hope they’re never in a position where they need me to help them with anything. There are adults who interfere in the affairs of the bullies and the bullied who don’t have the best interests of the victims at heart, after all. Sure, they say they do. It’s always about the children and all.

They just need to learn how to toughen up. It builds character.

Bullshit. I had more character than those assholes in the fourth grade.

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I’m 31 years old. I have a mortgage, a car payment, and a dog. I also divide the vast majority of the world into categories of “people who have hurt me” and “people who just haven’t gotten around to hurting me yet.” I’ve also been crying off and on for 24 hours because someone violated my trust in a way that’s really probably not a big deal to most people.[5]

If I could trade all that in for a little less character building between, say, ages 5 and 18, I would. I would do it in a heartbeat.

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[1]His parents did not help. My parents were behind his once during a junior high parent-teacher conference that went at least half an hour over the limit because they were haranguing the teachers on all the things they were doing wrong. At one point in high school one of my friends tore a couple pages in a magazine because the guy just would not leave us alone and it seemed like a good idea. I was a more-or-less innocent bystander to the whole thing but his mother called my mother and yelled at her. After my friend had confessed to the act and she said that such a thing was impossible because he was a good kid and I was a little shit.

By the way, for those keeping track at home, my list of misdeeds in high school consisted of smoking about three cigarettes and deciding I didn’t want anything to do with that particular activity.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, kids: that’s what you get for trying to be friends with that weird kid who has no friends because he’s completely and totally socially inept and his parents are certifiable. Although I did get to hear my mother rip his mother a new one over the phone, which was awesome. She was scared of my mom after that.

[2]My sister was friends with a guy when they were in junior high youth group together. By the time we hit high school or college age she hadn’t talked to him in years and had nothing nice to say about him. I once asked her why and she told me it was because he’d been a real ass behind my back.

The reason that came up was because he later ended up being a friend of sorts and I was friends with his siblings. He was a genuine asshole but always got the “true man of god” treatment because he was really good at playing the game. I always felt like I was doing something wrong by not liking him. There’s a lesson to be learned there.

[3]This is the sort of assertion that always gets a knee-jerk, “Hey, no it isn’t!” This is a thought that requires way more than a paragraph, but the simple fact of the matter is that the entire platform upon which that house is built is the base assumption that everyone is unfailingly awful and the only way to combat that is Jesus. So then when things go badly the only possible answer is that the person experiencing bad things must have failed somehow.

That is an awful, wicked thing to teach a kid who has a hard time summoning the courage to get up and go to school in the morning.

[4]The fact that I quit religion is a bigger factor, though. So this is somewhat speculative.

[5]And listening to the Counting Crows’ “Raining in Baltimore” and “A Murder of One” over and over and over again. I think that August and Everything After has to be one of the 10 best albums of the ‘90s.